A grey jumper with jeans, a natural baby face and a pair of black-framed glasses, it would be hard to imagine that this student-like boy in front of you would be the CEO of an Internet company with over 100 million yuan in funding if he hadn't introduced himself. 4 years ago, he was just a fresh graduate from university, but now he is already sitting in the spotlight as the founder of a company, participating in a show called "CEO is Coming". He is the founder and CEO of Keep, Wang Ning.
He is the founder and CEO of Keep, Wang Ning, a 90-year-old newspaper enthusiast who was always the "left and right protector" when he was in school.
In high school, Wang Ning was a relatively "different" student, "my teachers treated me like a super species". At that time, Wang Ning had been sitting on both sides of the podium, as if "the right and left guardian", a unique geographical location for Wang Ning's hobby to create the conditions. During his high school years, the most important thing Wang Ning did was to read the newspaper. To be precise, he read the newspaper intensively, i.e., every single centerfold, advertisement, and even every corner of the magazine's annotations and corrections. Through reading the newspaper day by day, Wang Ning felt the changes in society and saw the possibilities of the mobile Internet wave, and was anxious that he was too young to catch up with this blue ocean, but wanted to be closer to it.
During his university years, Wang Ning didn't stay idle, using his professional knowledge to start a small business experience. Wang Ning, who is a keen thinker, found that the class schedule of the teaching system was frequently used, but each operation was very inconvenient to refresh. In order to save and improve efficiency, he and his classmates developed a "Super Class Schedule" application. It was this young idea that made Wang Ning realise the importance of user research and product positioning analysis in his subsequent venture.
In his opinion, this was just a demo venture at university. This, however, has laid a solid foundation for the rapid development of Keep.
Deeply cultivating user needs, physically turning himself into a customer
From the launch to the harvest of 1 million fans, Keep took only 105 days. On the 921st day, the number of users exceeded 100 million. Such a remarkable achievement is inseparable from Keep's "mine plan": pay for something first, then slowly reap something.
At that time, the company was still in the 0-1 stage, the whole team did not have much money, how to get more users in the case of limited costs? Rather than laying advertisements, Wang Ning took the "alternative" approach of targeting the gathering places of sports enthusiasts and dieters, such as Weibo, QQ, WeChat groups and Douban groups, to create and distribute quality vertical content. Practicing "content is product, content is traffic, content is user", Keep relies on new media content to precipitate a large number of users, and then through word of mouth, word of mouth spreads. In the words of Wang Ning, "the first one million will take a long time, but the first one hundred million will be very fast".
Although the number of users of Keep has already exceeded one hundred million, but the deep cultivation of user experience is still the first important thing that Wang Ning pursues.
In March 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook showed up at Keep, when it broke the 80 million mark for users. Wang Ning gave Cook a yoga mat printed with 80000001 as a gift, in addition to positioning him as the 800000001st user, he also hoped to create an environment for Cook to experience the product and be motivated to personally feel the charm of Keep for every sports enthusiast.
In order to actually feel the users, Wang Ning has turned himself into a heavy user of Keep. Due to the late work hours, Wang Ning often clocked in at around 1am to work out, and the popular topic "late night fitness expert" in Keep was created by himself. At the beginning of last year, Keep planned to enter the running product form, Wang Ning physically feel the mentality of runners, with two to three months to prepare, completed his life's first full horse, also since then love to run marathons, "this year I set myself to run 5-6 marathons".
Under Wang Ning's leadership, Keep has gradually developed its own unique development speed, relying on physical insight into user needs.
The most difficult job at Keep is actually administrative
In the long ice age of the so-called capital winter, Keep received an angel investment of $3 million at the beginning of the venture, and then completed three rounds of funding of $5 million, $10 million and $32 million within a year's time. Some people say that Keep is easy to finance. In this regard, Wang Ning said frankly, "It's actually quite difficult to complete five rounds of financing in more than a year's time. When we were in the angel round, we took the bus every day to communicate, and what the investors saw in us was perseverance and persistence."
Wang Ning said in the show: "In fact, including the A round, after several rounds of financing, we are not actively looking for, it is like-minded people find us". The team has always believed that a product that users like will also be seen by the capital market, so Keep is not looking for investment in order to raise funds, but to do a good job with the product and then attract investment.
Although in the eyes of the outside world, Keep "not bad money", but the staff is revealed that Wang Ning is a person who is particularly cautious in spending money, not only is a heavy user of several discount promotion app, buy things will also compare three. In this regard, Wang Ning himself quipped: "The most difficult position in our company is the administration, because he purchases things, I will always find a lower price, so he will be very stressed, buy things to worry about than I buy expensive".
In fact, it is because he knows that financing is not easy that Wang Ning treasures every penny he gets from investors, hoping that it will be put to good use. Although Wang Ning is very "frugal" with himself, he is very generous with his staff and has always treated them as his business partners. "The brothers followed me all the way to today, I do my best to give them the best return, the best working environment and state", said Wang Ning.
